Uncommon Business is a blog about people who make money online selling unusual, strange and sometimes bizarre things or provide curious services. This isn’t “One Hundred And One Ideas For Your Homebased Business” – only real, working businesses with URLs provided, so you can do further investigation on your own. And if you do own an unusual web business, make sure you submit your story to us. SHLD

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

AdsSpy.Com Success Story

Great ideas for startups are often quite accidental. When SEOQuake tech guys indexed most sites in the internet, they were stuck with a load of information. Among them, whether or not a site runs any contextual advertisement through Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Chitika or Amazon.Com. This was easily determined by presence or absence of code that had a Publisher ID for one of the networks.

So, what’s so special about that? Well, first, each publisher gets assigned a specific ID. Most contextual advertisement networks, like Google, explicitly prohibit same publisher from getting more than one ID (the only way around is to register another business entity).

You could use the data to match publisher ID with all sites where it’s displayed. Essentially, if you know one site where Google Ads are displayed, you can know all sites that belong to that particular publisher and display Google Ads.

Is this important? You bet. First, since AdSense publishers are forced to use the same publisher ID, you can ‘spy’ on any publisher. You can see what other projects are online. You can compare ad layouts. You can uncover the secrets of successful webmasters, and learn some tips and tricks based on years of their practical experience.

Another handy application of the service is independent assessment of network quality. It’s no secret that people create websites specifically for making money with AdSense. These are known as MFA (made for AdSense) and generally provide lower ROIs than genuine websites that display ads. Google claims to combat them, but it’s always an uphill battle.

For heavy AdSense spenders, identifying and staying away from MFA sites is a big deal. With this tool, it’s brainlessly simple. First, MFA publishers generally have A LOT of websites (some over a thousand under the same ID). First, those MFA sites tend to have ‘ugly’ designs than force people to click, this inflating CTR and hurting advertisers.

There are other applications, too.

The service was launched on April 11 and got $800 dollars in subscription fees right away. Some SEO stars, like Aaron Wall of SEOBook.Com stopped by to comment about AdsSpy’s unique capabilities.

The fees are fairly reasonable, although by no means cheap – from $29.95 for seven day access up to $199.95 for 180-days premium access. A single report used to be sold for $4.95, but I don’t see the option available at this point.